One Last Riff with Glenn O’Brien, the King of New York Cool

Back in 2011 and 2012, in my capacity as a senior editor at GQ, I spent a lot of days sitting across from Glenn O’Brien at the dining room table of his apartment on Bond Street. We’d face each other, laptop to laptop, and I'd feed him topics while he knocked out text—one brilliant little coil of prose after the next. Every so often Glenn would pause to take a sip of tea, bark at his dog Arrow, or pull a volume by Rimbaud, Burroughs, or Aristotle from his bookshelf for quotation. While he pecked away, I’d check my email, or just sit gazing up at the row of a dozen or more framed Basquiat drawings that were propped on top of a tall green cabinet. A cute taxicab bopping down a street; a line drawing of Glenn in an oxford and a striped tie, talking on a telephone.

When Glenn finished a bit of copy, he’d simply spin his laptop around. I’d read the piece. “It’s perfect, send it to me.” “Okay,” he’d say. “What do you want me to do next?” “How about the introduction to the Vacation chapter” or “How about the bit on how to be friends with the opposite sex.” “Okay.” Tap tap tap tap tap.

Glenn was brilliant at so many things. He was a host, an editor, a creative director, an ad man, a critic, a muse, a comic, a public intellectual, a socialite, the list goes on. But to me one title says it all: writer.

And, man, Glenn O’Brien could spin it out. One doesn’t usually think of writing as an improvisational act, but Glenn was like a jazz musician. He had his own identifiable sound. Some favorite tempos, chords, and harmonies. A series of go-to moves he liked to make. From there, he’d just blow. In my experience, anyway, the first draft wasn’t just the best draft, it was the only draft. As an editor, I’ve never done so little editing. (My copy of How to Be a Man is inscribed, “For Will, my technical advisor,” which pretty much captures it.) The only reason I started showing up at Glenn’s door so often is because, if I went to see him in person, we could dig through his photo archives to find shots of him with Warhol, Madonna, Alice Cooper, and David Bowie to run alongside the text. And I could get him to focus on the copy he owed to me, instead of the copy he was always writing for so many other editors and entities around the world.

We developed our slightly strange method of working together in-person while Glenn was writing a piece about social climbing, which GQ published in April 2011 as The Style Guy’s Guide to Friendship, Schmoozing, and Social Advancement. It’s a hell of a piece. One of the reasons Glenn is so beloved by so many young readers is because he dished out bulletproof wisdom and hard-won advice on life situations that all of us experience but nobody but Glenn talks about: How to get fired with the right mix of grace, dignity, and attitude. How to manage friendships with assholes. How to find a mentor or a mentee. All the shit your dad never taught you—and probably never learned himself—except how to do your taxes. If every college curriculum taught the collected works of Glenn O’Brien, or at least How to Be a Man, society would be far more civilized.

In 2012, I spent a couple months at Glenn’s dining room table getting him to write a special issue of GQ called The Style Guy, which collected the greatest hits of Glenn’s monthly column with newly-written wisdom like how to groom yourself like a god and why it's important to have a close personal relationship with a really good tailor. (The issue is long sold out, but it looks like there’s one available on eBay.) As part of that issue, Glenn and I dug through his wardrobe and had all the most interesting clothes heroically photographed by Nigel Cox for a bit called “From the Closet of the Style Guy.” When I heard Glenn passed away, that’s the first stuff I wanted to look at—his famous Perfecto, crowned across the back by Basquiat; his Ewing-era Hoya Destroya Nikes—so we’ve republished those images and the captions he wrote for them here. Since then, I've been thumbing through my copies of all the books: How to Be a Man, Soapbox, The Cool School, Human Nature (Dub Version), and reading at random.

Glenn and I were not speaking when he passed away. Things did not end well between The Style Guy and GQ, and, ever the freelancer, Glenn was deeply suspicious of corporations and the “swinish minions” who work for them, myself included. It’s a little hard to type those words, but they come directly from the “Social Climbing” piece we created together.

So be it. Because of Glenn, I know that feuding with friends is part of adult life. Plus, as Glenn’s status as a downtown legend goes mythical, I’m sure the situation will come in handy one day, years from now, at a party full of young Style Guys aspirants: “Glenn O’Brien? Yeah I knew him. I was once his technical advisor, but we weren’t speaking when he died.”

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